We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought

 to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.

 Yes sir. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window

In The Cinematic Society, the sociologist Norman K. Denzin observes that “the postmodern is a visual, cinematic age; it knows itself in part through the reflections that flow from the camera’s eye. The voyeur is the iconic, postmodern self. Adrift in a sea of symbols, we find ourselves, voyeurs all, products of the cinematic gaze.”¹ Cinema and television transform us into voyeurs, they open a window to reality in a way that is impossible, and to a certain extent undesirable, for theater. This is why the voyeur is a staple character and voyeuristic activities recurrent in film history. Alfred Hitchcock, says Denzin, is the voyeur director par excellence, and films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956) and Rear Window (1954) are the pinnacle works of voyeurism in American cinema.

In Rear Window, Hitchcock shows us how it is the voyeur’s gaze that penetrates the private lives of others even before the camera has entered the house (9.9). Jeff, a photographer bound to a wheelchair after an accident, spends his convalescence contemplating the lives of his neighbors from his window. Like images on a television set, the lives of others are simultaneously accessible and distant (9.11). One day, however, Jeff believes he has witnessed a murder. The suspect, Byung-Chul Han tells us, “looks at Jeff across the way, this uncanny gaze of the other, indeed this gaze from the real”² destroys the voyeur’s enchanted gaze. Being able to return the gaze makes the image of the other become real, both parties meet again in a common reality. Symmetry and reciprocity break the spell of the image. When the killer finally breaks into Jeff's house to confront him, the photographer “tries to blind the assailant with a flash—that is, to banish the man into the image and repress him, as it were. But the attempt fails.” Jeff is thrown out of the window which, Han tells us, has ceased to be a rear window and become a real one.

As if it wanted to approach the threshold between the imaginary and the real it so masterfully portrayed, Rear Window was rehashed in 1998 into a TV movie. Christopher Reeve, the actor who reprised James Stewart’s role, was actually confined to a wheelchair.

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1. Norman K. Denzin, The Cinematic Society. Quoted by Calvert in Voyeur Nation, 43. ↩︎
2. Han, In the Swarm, 28. ↩︎
3. It is worth mentioning that in the original German edition of In the Swarm, the adjective for the “gaze of the other, the gaze from the real” is unheimliche. Thus, for Han the uncanny, that which is disconcerting but familiar of old, is reality itself. ↩︎
4. Han, In the Swarm, 28. ↩︎